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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • You got to wait for the trial. Throughout history, but especially this year, we’ve seen many famous trials where the cops blatantly lied about evidence of course in press reports as they often do but also in court on the stand under oath. Just because you heard it doesn’t mean it’s true. Just because someone told you they have evidence of something, doesn’t mean they do.



  • I think he’s going to get state charges for murder, that would be the normal thing.

    There is an open legal question about what happens if he has done something that could be a crime under both federal and state, because double jeopardy says he can’t be tried twice for the same crime. So if the feds brought charges and then he got pardoned, I don’t think the state can bring relatively identical charges, but apparently this is a question that legal scholars don’t know the answer to, and it would probably end up going to the appeals court if it were to happen.

    Of course it’s not going to happen because Biden likes those rich assholes and the timing doesn’t really make sense anyway.



  • When I got paid minimum wage to work at a grocery store, I certainly didn’t give it 100% every day. They paid me minimum wage because they wanted to pay me less, but the law wouldn’t let them. Why should I stress myself out for a job like that? Of course I shouldn’t, and it didn’t bother my bosses that it took it easy on a regular basis.

    The same general principle applies to other jobs as well. If you’re fairly low on the totem pole and some the big problem comes up that could affect the company in a major way, you’d be out of your mind to try to tackle it yourself. They don’t pay you enough to risk your job to tackle it yourself. It’s your boss or your boss’s problem.








  • Doesn’t that depend on the person? I’ve interacted with many people in different ways over the years, and if I made an impact on them it’s probably not something that a couple of words would meaningfully encompass.

    To put it differently, if I think about people who have passed away or people who used to live close to me but now live far away so we’re no longer in contact, the people where I think they changed my life or how I think or feel, talking about them always involves telling a story, or maybe two or three. And that’s how it should be, right?


  • Your theory about companies raising prices to offset UBI is actually undercut by historical and present evidence.

    There was a time when the United States had welfare. The United States still has food stamps. But nobody is seriously pretending that these things did or do drive up grocery prices.

    Similarly, over time various states have raised minimum wage, and if your argument were accurate, then the prices in those states would have immediately risen to match minimum wage, but they didn’t.

    In other words, you’re repeating a conservative talking point that has been repeatedly debunked by reality. I think you could try to improve your argument by arguing that inflation happens across the board, to everything, and therefore it would also happen to UBI. But what we’ve actually seen is that’s not true.


  • It’s important to recognize that the system in the US is more convoluted than you believe. It’s not like we have totally separate drug manufacturers versus distributors versus hospitals versus insurers. There’s a fair amount of overlap, and a lot of it is relatively secretive, so you don’t know where the kickbacks are. You don’t know who’s jacking up prices in general knowing that they’re going to lower prices for the company that they are partners with. All of which is to say, this is not a fair market, this is not a market where you can reasonably compete if you play by the rules, but even if they actually bothered to follow the rules, you’re already screwed because they have market dominance.

    The only path forward is through government run single payer healthcare. You can call it NHS, you can call it whatever you want, but it has to be run by the government. You need the government to set price ranges for drugs and treatments so that the drug companies and the hospitals don’t f*** over everyone.

    But I don’t think Americans are ready for that yet. Obviously Trump winning the election makes it incredibly unlikely, but I think even large numbers of Democrat voters are still trapped in American exceptionalism. They know they’re getting fleeced, but they aren’t yet willing to say that they should probably copy what’s happening north of the border or across either ocean. They have good stories, things about super long wait times or lack of doctor choice, pretending that those things don’t happen in the US, and then pretending that those things do happen in every other country that has universal health care, which is laughable. But it’s hard, because so many people are desperate to believe that the US is the greatest country in the world, and they are desperate to avoid recognizing that they’ve been getting f***** right in the ear for the last few decades.